“He Lost His Mind”: Trump Hits Back After Bannon Accuses His Son of Treason

The onetime populist dream team may have suffered a fatal fracture.

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Steve Bannon in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, February 7, 2017.

By Andrew Harrer/Pool/Getty Images.

In mid-October, with their legislative agenda at stake, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell held a press conference in the Rose Garden to signal their detente. The Republican Party had been fractured in the battle over health care, which had surfaced old tensions between the party’s establishment and its far-right wing, led by former White House strategist Steve Bannon. Bannon, after being expelled from the West Wing, had made it his mission to take his revenge on the establishment players he blamed for his ouster, and for derailing Trump’s agenda, and had vowed to target McConnell’s leadership position in particular. But Trump, when asked about the civil war, glossed over any rift. “I have a very good relationship, as you know, with Steve Bannon,” the president said, as McConnell stood warily by his side. “Steve’s been a friend of mine for a long time, I like Steve a lot. Steve is doing what Steve thinks is the right thing.”

Bannon, it seemed, had a green light to target members of Trump’s own party. But a series of unforced errors—including the loss of Bannon’s chosen candidate, Roy Moore, in Alabama, and a penchant for blabbing to the press—cost him his immunity. And when Bannon dared attack members of the First Family in excerpts from Michael Wolff’s forthcoming book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which were published Wednesday, the response from Trump was swift and ruthless. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind,” the president said in a statement Wednesday. “Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well.”

Trump’s blistering repudiation came hours after the Guardian reported that Bannon, who has made a habit of pilloryingJared Kushner in the press, had trashed Donald Trump Jr. in Wolff’s book for holding a 2016 meeting with Russians promising dirt on Hillary Clinton. “Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the F.B.I. immediately,” Bannon reportedly said. The president’s son, he predicted, would crack “like an egg on national TV” under pressure.

Bannon also offered his view of where Robert Mueller’s investigation is headed, pinning a predictable bullseye on Kushner. “This is all about money laundering . . . Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr. and Jared Kushner,” Wolff quotes him as saying. Last month, prosecutors reportedly subpoenaed records from Deutsche Bank—a big lender to both the Trump Organization and Kushner Companies. “It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit. The Kushner shit is greasy. They’re going to go right through that. They’re going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me . . . They’re sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five,” Bannon reportedly said.

It goes without saying that Steve Bannon’s predictions are not always prescient—by way of example, look no further than the Alabama Senate race. But it is remarkable that a former close ally of the president, who was recently said to have spoken to the president five times since leaving the White House, not only throws members of the First Family under the bus, but gives weight to the investigation his former boss has repeatedly called “a witch hunt.” Though the president again insisted in an interview with The New York Times last week that there was “no collusion,” Bannon is perhaps the highest-ranking person in Trump’s orbit to fail to dismiss wrongdoing by members of the campaign outright.

When Bannon’s comments were initially made public, the White House was caught off guard. Sources close to the president were reportedly shocked by Bannon’s on-the-record statements, telling Axios that they were “prepared for the Wolff book to be bad for them . . . but they weren’t prepared for Bannon doing this.” But the administration seems to have recovered quickly, firing off subsequent statements from press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and First Lady Melania Trump. “Participating in a book that can only be described as trashy tabloid fiction exposes their sad desperate attempts at relevancy,” Sanders’ statement read.

It’s unclear whether the wannabe kingmaker and his onetime populist puppet will reunite, but a source “familiar with the matter” told Bloomberg that the access to Trump that Bannon enjoyed even after his departure from the White House has now ended.

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